Transcript Angela Brady Former President of the Royal Institute Of

Transcript Angela Brady Former President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. My name is Angela Brady, I’m a director of Brady Mallalieu Architects based in London, and I’m the past president of The Royal Institute of British Architects, the IBA. John Wilson who was leading the Save Preston Bus Station campaign, he approached me as President and said would I back the campaign and would I sign his petition? I think the building itself is very important because it is set in time and you know, often people misunderstand areas or eras of architecture and they pull them down. I mean even Kings Cross St Pancras – the St Pancras which is now the hotel – that was going to be pulled down, and now we all appreciate it as a beautiful building. But with Preston Bus Station I think the significance is that it is one of the key European Brutalistic buildings, and it’s very much intact, it’s very significant not only as a piece of architecture but for the people in Preston themselves. When you have a whole collection of buildings in an older city that’s over two, three or four hundred years old, you want to be able to read it like a book, like a page by page of what’s happened every fifty or a hundred years. Now if you didn’t have the 1960s Brutalistic architecture like Preston Bus Station for example, and you had to demolish that, you have a page missing in the history and it makes it very hard for people to understand, you know from just a story, you don’t have the physical building there, even if the building changes with time you know, that’s flexible, that’s a good thing. But if you actually demolish that building altogether, then you have just taken a piece of history away and I think that would be a great shame in any town or city. I think my personal hope will be that more people will be actually using public transport as they do car shares, and then have no cars. But I think one of the things here is that at key nodes intersections, it’s public transport that is the way of the future for connecting cities and that’s where now Preston Bus Station is probably ahead of its time, because it is such a large bus station, and as people will have to cut down on fossil fuels and cut down on their own public private transport, that buses are going to be much more of the future. When this building was designed and built in 1969, it was part of the brave new world, doing something different. We now have a new type of optimism for this building because it is saved, it is part of, it is a big public building. I think as long as it remains in kind of public and community use, then the community can come up with all kinds of new ideas for its future use, so there is still optimism there for the future, for changing it as we evolve. Transcript Graham Carr Joiner working for John Laing during the construction of Preston Bus Station. I’m Graham Carr and I worked for John Laing’s on the Bus Station fifty years ago. Preston Bus Station will stand out with me. It was my first job with John Laing’s. You’ve achieved something, working on something that you know is going to be there for years and years. The Project Manager interviewed us, took us on, (me and a friend). We started work going around the perimeter of it, doing the tongue and groove boarding, all the way and then, for the numbers to be fitted on for each place, that’s where the stands were going to go. Then after that I worked on the shuttering, the stairs. Most of the shuttering had been done before, but it was very enjoyable working here, a complete team spirit that was there. I knew then that this was the firm I wanted to work, for especially on the Bus Station. It was absolutely fantastic. The men, the different nationalities that I’ve worked with, Sikhs, Poles, Hungarian, all tradesmen and some labourers, but it was a fantastic feeling working with them. Different ideas were picked up. But they say, the Poles, if there were any little marks on the concrete, they could touch it up, they could clean it, they could made it beautiful. You see, wherever you look up here, where I’m looking at now there’s loads, everything is concrete, but its smooth, it’s finished, everything about is finished. There’s not hardly any brickwork as you can see, and everything was made just a few yards away from you. Constructed into the moulds, cast, set, the crane would lift it up, place it in position and then take it down for the next one. Everything built on site, which was unheard of at the time. It’s most important is the Bus Station. Put simply, you’ve got to get from A to B. I mean I can’t go to Scotland from my local bus station. I’ve got to come to Preston to catch one. I don’t even go, I can’t even get a bus from Chorley to go to Blackpool. I’ve got to come to Preston and get a bus from here to go to that. If you have a car, perhaps people say they are not interested in a bus station. If you haven’t got a car you want the best, and I think Preston’s provided with the best. If you’ve no car, you have to get here. Transcript Bob Frost Skateboarder I’m Bob Frost, and I’m from Preston and I’m a skateboarder and I guess the relationship with the building is to do with skateboarding. Well it was the eighties, it wasn’t like it is now, in the eighties everyone was pretty poor. There was a lot of, what is very similar to what is happening now in society, it’s a very polarized nation. I don’t know, it just felt a bit of a dangerous place to be, the bus station, especially of an evening, but I guess that was being a teenager coming into town for the first time. You start skating outside your house on the curb outside your house or wherever, down the street. You get on the bus and come into town and you’re like oh wow it’s not as, it’s just different and it’s getting used to somewhere new. It did have that sort of dangerous feel to it, but is part of the charm and the attraction. We went up the steps because we were too scared to get in the lifts, probably in the late eighties, probably watched The Equalizer too many times and just thought, oh I don’t know about public lifts. So we went all the way up the stairs and got to the top and we started skating around and obviously you can skate from the top all the way down to the bottom in a big loop. We started doing that in groups, racing down there and then we started having a go on the actual quarter pipes on the side, which was a bit more hairy, because there was a massive drop on the other side. But I’ve got friends that could skate it pretty well, I mean I didn’t skate that much because it always got to me – the fact that if you got it wrong you could plummet to your death. The rest of the building, the banks on the top floor, the curb by the entrance to the ramp going down to the Guild Hall. That curb is somewhere we spent most of our time skating because it was a painted curb and you didn’t get painted curbs in England, they were always in America, and we had our very own painted curb in the bus station. So we skated there a lot and then throughout the whole building really because it was part of the route on a Sunday when you came into town and skated for six or seven hours because there was no one else in town. It was ours until 1994 when Sunday trading came in and ruined everything. I mean the structure always looked good back then, but you were more concerned with skateable terrain, which I am still now, but the actual distinct shape of it, the curves, and I also like the ramps – the car parking ramps – I think they look awesome. They’re just dead simple and effective and it’s just built with concrete which is one of the most beautiful mediums out there in my opinion, but then again I’m biased because I’m a skateboarder. Skateboarders and concrete go together. It’s more accessible now is skateboarding, there’s more skate parks being built, you see skating on the TV, big companies are getting involved and whatever you feel about that, it’s exposing it to more people, and I’ve definitely noticed down at the park there’s two or three girls skateboarding, but I can’t really speak for BMXing or scootering. There’s definitely a history going back to the sort of mid to late eighties of skateboarders using this place and it should really be embraced.

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